Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

Resumen

A provocative and positive response to Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and other New Atheists, Good Without God makes a bold claim for what nonbelievers do share and believe. Author Greg Epstein, the Humanist chaplain at Harvard, offers a world view for nonbelievers that dispenses with the hostility and intolerance of religion prevalent in national bestsellers like God is Not Great and The God Delusion. Epstein’s Good Without God provides a constructive, challenging response to these manifestos by getting to the heart of Humanism and its positive belief in tolerance, community, morality, and good without having to rely on the guidance of a higher being.

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Good Without God - Greg Epstein

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God."

CHAPTER ONE

Can We Be Good Without God?

So It’s Been Said, Many Times, Many Ways: How Should You Respond When Your Way of Life Is Insulted by One of the Most Powerful Men in the World?

There is an ethical dilemma I have struggled to find the right answer to—because to be honest, one of my deepest convictions as a Humanist is that no one person can ever have all the answers. If you ever meet anyone who tells you his or her religion can offer all the answers, run for the hills. Or at least hide your wallet.

But the dilemma I’m talking about is one that millions of people face every day: how should you respond when your way of life is insulted by one of the most powerful men in the world?

This is not necessarily a life-or-death question. Though it could be. In 2006 an obscure cartoonist for a Danish newspaper drew a series of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad as a comically angry terrorist. Hilarity did not ensue. Hundreds of thousands rioted. Embassies burned.

A number of years earlier, novelist Salman Rushdie satirized the process of writing the Qur’an in his The Satanic Verses and nearly paid with his head after receiving an unfunny valentine (Rushdie’s words) from the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, a fatwa calling for his death. And so if cartoonists and novelists can provoke such a reaction, what happens if such insults are made by someone truly influential? Like, say, the most powerful preacher in the most powerful country in the world—a megachurch minister who is said to have trained over four hundred thousand evangelists for leadership in Christian communities and who, after a long summer in 2008 when it seemed that Barack Obama and John McCain would never appear together, was the first to bring the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees together publicly so that each could be interviewed by him and him alone?

But I’m not asking what Muslims would do if the Reverend Rick Warren were to insult them. I’m wondering how the nonreligious should respond to his repeated statements that he could never vote for an atheist as president of the United States—including saying so on Larry King Live just hours after hosting his Saddleback Forum with Obama and McCain in August 2008. Warren has in fact become this generation’s most eloquent, charismatic advocate for a certain very old opinion that lashes out against the worth and dignity of those who consider themselves atheists, agnostics, or nonreligious. In The Purpose Driven Life, he writes:

If your time on earth were all there is to your life, I would suggest you start living it up immediately. You could forget about being good and ethical, and you wouldn’t have to worry about any consequences of your actions. You could indulge yourself in total self-centeredness because your actions would have no long-term repercussions. But—and this makes all the difference—death is not the end of you! Death is not your termination, but your transition into eternity, so there are eternal consequences to everything you do on earth. Every act of our lives strikes some chord that will vibrate in eternity.¹

Warren’s tone here is positive, even inspiring, despite the negative message that a nonreligious person, one without a literal belief in resurrection, has no reason to be decent. So lest he be misunderstood as more broadminded and tolerant than he is, let’s note that on the previous page of The Purpose Driven Life, he is quite clear about what he thinks of nonbelievers: While life on earth offers many choices, eternity offers only two: heaven or hell. Your relationship to God on earth will determine your relationship to him in eternity. If you learn to love and trust God’s Son, Jesus, you will be invited to spend the rest of eternity with him. On the other hand, if you reject his love, forgiveness, and salvation, you will spend eternity apart from God forever.²

Here, despite Warren’s eloquence, the author of a book billed as the best-selling nonfiction book in history (one might ask, does this imply that the Bible is fiction?) is damning you to eternal hell if you are not a traditional Christian. It’s a profound insult—maybe against you, maybe against your mother, father, spouse, child, or friend.

But how to respond? Should we insult Warren back, call him a buffoon, a charlatan, a brainwasher for Jesus—take the rhetorical eye for an eye? Or should we turn the other cheek? Should we ignore him? I was taught as a child that it is best to ignore petty schoolyard taunting. But is it really safe to ignore such a deep-cutting insult from a man who is famous not merely for being pretty, or athletic, but for being wildly influential?

It would be one thing if it were only Warren who was leveling this charge that we can’t be good without God. But plenty of other influential Christians have been doing so for a very long time now—for example, C. S. Lewis, with his all-too-common claim that when we debunk God, we become slaves to our base impulses, left with no ethical foundation: When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains…The Conditioners, therefore, must come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure…My point is that those who stand outside all judgments of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse.³

Other Christians like to emphasize that if we lose God, we lose absolute values, without which we will end up in the moral gutter. Albert Mohler, head of the influential Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, gives this frequent insult concise and charismatic voice on his blog: If human beings are left to our own devices and limited to our own wisdom, we will invent whatever model of ‘good character’ seems right at the time. Without God there are no moral absolutes. Without moral absolutes, there is no authentic knowledge of right and wrong.⁴

But it is not only Christians who say we can’t be good without God.

In the Muslim world, perhaps the most powerful and portentous theological message of the past half century has been the notion that secularism, whether in the West or the Middle East, is the corrupt and degenerate reign of man.Humanity today stands on the brink of the abyss…To establish the reign of God on earth and eliminate the reign of man, to take power out of those who have usurped it and return it to God alone. This is a quote from not just any Muslim thinker but Sayyed Qutb, aka Osama Bin Laden’s ideological godfather, who added chillingly and prophetically, this will not be done through sermons and discourse.⁵

And while you may not be shocked to hear of conservative Muslim thinkers agreeing with conservative Christians in their denigration of atheism and secularism, I was surprised to note—as a graduate student several years ago taking a class on liberal, progressive, and pluralistic voices among the world’s religious traditions with Diana Eck, founder of the Pluralism Project and one of America’s foremost advocates for interreligious understanding—that even many of the world’s most open-minded Muslim theologians see secularists and atheists as villains to be rallied against. In the words of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a Harvard-and MIT-trained professor of Islamic studies and author of The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity, secularism is the common enemy of all the Abrahamic traditions, and the erosion of moral authority in secular societies that we observe today poses as many problems for Jews and Christians as it does for Muslims. Nasr later continues, the idea of living at peace while denying God is totally absurd.⁶ These words of wisdom are from a book Eck assigned at Harvard as an example of progressive, open-minded Islam. (The book has since been removed from Eck’s curriculum.) Read liberal Islamic theology today, and unfortunately you’ll find a lot more of this approach—attempts to find common ground with Christians and Jews at the expense of demonizing an easy-to-attack, badly misunderstood secular enemy.

And to add yet another voice to the modern chorus calling out that we can’t be good without God, Hitler agreed with much of what is recorded above. Hitler is often erroneously labeled a secularist or atheist by ignorant religious blowhards desperately searching for a response to the complaint that the Crusades and the Inquisition were religious movements that caused great suffering in the name of God. Of course, the Crusades and the Inquisition were religious and did cause great suffering, but beyond acknowledging that here, you won’t find me rehashing such attacks on religion. My purpose is not to rake faith in God over the coals in every possible way. Nevertheless, let’s be clear that neither Hitler nor Nazism is ever an appropriate comeback to such arguments against religion. In carrying out the Holocaust, Hitler wrote, I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.⁷ The Nazi army’s belts were inscribed Gott mit uns! (God is with us).

This is what baffles me most about the you-can’t-be-good-without-God canard, what makes my jaw drop with disbelief: considering Hitler and bin Laden and others like them, it is probably the only belief that has united some of the most despicable human beings to walk the earth during the twentieth century, and yet we still take the argument seriously, whether it comes from Rick Warren or just some poor lost soul looking for an evil enemy. It saddens me to reflect that such polar opposites in theological, political, and cultural terms find some sick common ground in denigrating my values and worldview. But they do, they are not alone, and their thinking is not new.

The History of a Lousy Idea

Indeed, no man can be good without the help of God.

—Seneca, first century CE

The idea that we can’t be good without God has been circulating in religious and philosophical literature for a long time. Almost two millennia at least, since the Roman Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca said so in the middle of the first century of the Common Era. And even then, it didn’t mean much. When Seneca said it, he wasn’t talking about the Christian God, or the Jewish God, neither of which was a blip on the radar screen of most Greco-Roman philosophers at that time. Seneca wasn’t even saying we couldn’t be moral without a particularly robust version of Zeus or another member of the pagan pantheon. If anything, Seneca’s message was liberal and nontraditional, a clever way to argue against the kind of zealous god-worship you can find reenacted in the HBO series Rome, complete with young women bathed in the blood of a freshly slaughtered cow in the ardent hope that the sacrifice will bring good fortune in a coming battle.

Seneca, a tutor to the young man who would become Rome’s Emperor Nero, was writing to a young charge about how, in general, one becomes a good person. Never a task for the fainthearted, and recognizing this, he first established his credibility the only way one really can on such issues: by admitting he didn’t have all the answers. Seneca explained, in his Epistles to Lucilius, that he asked to be thought of not so much as a doctor come to cure all the patient’s illnesses but as a caring fellow patient, recognizing compassionately that he was in a shared hospital room with other frightened patients, and choosing to talk to himself (and his pupil) in the hopes that the thought he put into saving himself from life’s errors would benefit others as well.

Seneca began his answer to the question of how goodness, wisdom, and understanding are achieved with the more obvious answer that how we don’t get them is through praying for them: We do not need to uplift our hands toward heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol’s ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. So far, pretty secular stuff. Seneca continued, however, with a statement that would not only have been considered radical at the time, but is also the kind of theology that gives fundamentalist Christian preachers fits to this day: God is near you, he is with you, He is within you. This is what I mean, Lucilius: a holy spirit indwells within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our guardian.

This is God as the inner voice, the combination in popular Christian terms of Santa Claus marking whether we have been naughty or nice and Mother Mary watching out for us when we are alone and troubled. It’s the most convenient kind of god, actually—one who takes care of us when we need care and compels neither our subscription to any specific theological creed about him nor tithing to any temple to keep his name up in golden lights. It is about this sort of deity that Seneca then penned the infamous line Indeed, no man can be good without the help of God. Seneca’s statement, then, is really more like no man is good without being true to himself. He concludes this passage with the statement that there is no external force compelling us to be good—that we must compel ourselves to do so.

A fair question to ask about this whole sordid episode in intellectual history, then, might be what in heaven or earth was Seneca even talking about? Or, why did Seneca feel the need to write about this kind of God? Most likely it was because, given what Seneca believed, he was just the sort of person who in his day might easily have been accused of atheism himself—a punishable sin among the Romans.

A man with Seneca’s beliefs—that you couldn’t simply sacrifice a virgin to Mars to win a war, or squash a cockroach in honor of Janus, Gaia, and Dis to bring good fortune to your poor family—would have been dangerous in those days not only to those who managed the temple cults but also to the political leaders who justified their often brutal decision-making by claiming the gods’ favor. In fact, we religious skeptics have always been a little dangerous to those religious and political authorities who have nothing to offer their people in this world and so must promise more fortune in the next one to maintain control. We continue to be so. But conservative authorities have, since ancient days, had a clever counterstrategy against religious skepticism—convincing people that atheism is evil, and then accusing their enemies of being atheists.

We now come back to the question of how to respond to Rick Warren’s insult. It represents a long tradition, which doesn’t make the choice of whether to lash back or turn the other cheek any easier.

A large part of the problem is ignorance. What we do not understand frightens us. Fear begets prejudice. And not only do most people have no idea who we nonreligious people are, or what we stand for, we also aren’t usually able to articulate much about ourselves and our own beliefs. We know what we don’t believe. But not what we do. And so we become a blank slate, a convenient place for religious people of all kinds to project their fears about immorality and degeneration.

No matter how you think we should respond to these fears and the insults that so often accompany them, a large part of the solution must be education. We must do more to spread awareness about our answers, our beliefs, and our values. As Humanists, nonreligious people have positive, inspiring answers to all of life’s great questions, starting with the most basic—who are we, and where do we come from?

In the Beginning

Fifteen billion years ago, in a great flash, the universe flared forth into being."⁸ These are the opening words of The Universe Story, by mathematician and cosmologist Brian Swimme and the late cultural historian Thomas Berry, who illustrate how our true origins are even more grand and awe-inspiring than the stories in Genesis or any of the world religion’s sacred texts.

We are all part of an amazing story in that, as Swimme and Berry put it, every living being of Earth is cousin to every other being.⁹ Our history began with the Big Bang, a primordial flaring forth it continued with this galaxy’s first star, which appeared five billion years later, and the Milky Way’s birthing of our sun five billion years ago. With the formation of Earth a billion years later came the first living cell, and then two billion years after that came new kinds of cells that invented both sexual reproduction and the predator-prey relationship. These twin developments led to an ever-quickening spiral of change: from the first multicellular animals, to mammals who could sense their environment and feel emotion, to human self-awareness and the ability to stand upright and use tools, to the domestication of fire and the human creation of myth, agriculture, villages, religion, culture, cities, and eventually to the three universalist religions (Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam), mass migration, liberal democracy, the multinational corporation, and American Idol.

This is the story of evolution. Humanists accept that the scientific evidence for evolution is overwhelming; we build our worldview around it because we want to look reality square in the face, unblinking, unflinching, unafraid of the truth. But the story of evolution is not the sole property of Humanism. Billions of religious people have accepted the basic tenets of this story as well. The Catholic Church, with its 1.1 billion members, has officially affirmed the reality of evolution—and has acknowledged that intelligent design is not science. Of course, I vigorously disagree with what I see as the contorted, nonsensical logic by which Catholic doctrine seeks to suggest that evolution and the traditional Biblical creation story can both be true. But to the extent that Catholics and other religious groups accept that we have reliable evidence for evolution, they are our allies and our friends.

What is unique about the Humanistic view of evolution is that it affirms that the process, from its very beginnings, must be considered unguided. As Richard Dawkins explained in The Blind Watchmaker, it is gloriously and utterly wrong¹⁰ to assume that living things must have had a conscious, purposeful creator the same way that a pocket watch does. As much as it might seem noble to have been created for a reason, true nobility for us lies in being honest about being able to discern no purpose given to human beings by the Big Bang. All the evidence suggests that creation narratives like that found in Genesis are neither literally true nor divinely inspired metaphors but simply the first flawed human attempts to answer questions for which we now have much better answers. The billions of stars and trillions of big and small rocks that surround us in this universe do not care about us, and do not love us. They do not hear our prayers. The only guidance for which we have ever seen evidence is human guidance. The only purposes we’ve ever been able to understand are the purposes we have created and chosen. A blind watchmaker created us. But it is now time for us to open our eyes and take responsibility for our future.

How Do We Know Our Story Is True?

Humanism is not in the business of absolute certainties. We do not claim to be able to prove that evolution happened or that there is no God in the same way that we know 2 + 2 = 4. But too many theologians, clerics, and other self-styled religious authorities have tried to convince the credulous that this means there is no difference between the scientific story I just recounted and any traditional faith as they answer the important questions about who we are and how we got here. We should remind them that the question is not whether one believes, but what evidence one’s beliefs are based on.

All beliefs are based on something. Beliefs in supernatural events such as miracles are based on tradition—such as reading about it in a book we’re told is sacred—or intuition—as in those moments when it seems there must be something looking out for us. And sometimes traditions and intuitions are correct. But they are not reliable ways to determine whether something is true. Think of it this way: would you want to fly in an airplane designed by an engineer with no advanced scientific degree, who in fact did not believe in science, and instead consulted the Bible or the pope for advice on how to build airplanes? If you developed a potentially fatal disease like cancer, would you want to be treated by a friend with no medical training, who claimed only to have a strong sense of how to heal you? Of course you would not. The scientific method, while imperfect, is the most reliable tool human beings have ever known for determining the nature of the world around us.

Call Humanism a faith if you like—we should have no particular allergy to that word—but recognize that it is a faith in our ability to live well based on conclusions and convictions reached by empirical testing and free, unfettered rational inquiry. In other words, we question everything, including our own questions, and we search for as many ways as we can to confirm or deny our intuitions. We have no holy books meant to be taken at face value or blindly obeyed. We are open to revising any conclusion we have made if new evidence appears to contradict it.

However, we also recognize that there can and often is a point where sufficient evidence has been gathered on a certain subject to make a reversal of views extraordinarily unlikely, and where the explanation we have pieced together works extremely well. This is certainly the case with whether the sun will rise tomorrow, and it is equally true for evolution, and about our basic picture of the origins of the universe.

Now, sometimes you have people who legitimately do not understand the scientific method—I know I have often felt confused about the process by which scientists gather evidence, test hypotheses, and draw conclusions about, say, the fact that there may be several hundred billion galaxies as opposed to only a few dozen billion. The solution to this problem is education—about science, about what it means to be skeptical of untested claims. Some of our best educators about science in the past generation have also been active, committed Humanists, such as Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, and many others. But others who have considered themselves religious have also done excellent scientific work. We disagree with their reasoning on theological issues, but we are capable of working with them extremely well in scientific and public policy endeavors.

As for those who manipulate science and Humanism for their own political and social gain—who intentionally or out of extreme and willful ignorance mock us as having no sound basis for our beliefs—who mislead millions of people into thinking that evolution is a hoax, a joke, a satanic plot—we must engage these individuals forcefully. That doesn’t mean by military force, though sometimes Christopher Hitchens sounds as if he does want all-out war with the godly, but I digress. Sometimes we need to point out that some of the ways we are attacked and criticized are absurd, even downright funny. Sometimes the most forceful way to respond to our conservative religious critics is with humor.

Bertrand Russell created his orbiting space teapot theory to show that yes, we acknowledge that we cannot prove there is not a God, or gods, or goddesses, or spirits or ghouls or goblins (it is impossible to prove this kind of a negative, after all), but that we also acknowledge there might be a giant floating vessel of silky Darjeeling tea somewhere off in the far reaches of the galaxy, and we have not a shred of credible evidence for the existence of any of them. For this same reason, a brilliant young American named Bobby Henderson recently created the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Henderson, nonplussed by the efforts of right-wing Christians to force the teaching of intelligent design in public schools in his home state of Kansas, asserted that of course there is a designer of the universe—and that he had been personally touched by the Creator’s noodly appendage. Equal time, he demanded, must be given in public schools for the teaching of the spaghetti creation controversy, because Henderson, his many coreligionists, and all their traditional texts asserted plainly that their doctrine was true.

I admit I find the cult of the FSM hysterically funny, but I have no desire to offend my liberal religious allies, and it would be nice if this sort of humor could be restricted in its distribution to those who need to hear it—if our religious allies could be spared a sense that they were being mocked by our secular sensibilities. But that is not the way public discourse works. When James Dobson or Rick Warren makes a claim about the world, not only are conservative Evangelicals in a position to hear it; everyone is. The same goes for the pope, or whoever else. And so, when an atheist or Humanist spokesperson responds with humor to the more unreasonable, indeed ridiculous claims made by some religious authorities, everyone is going to have to hear and interpret it in his or her own way. The point is not to mock religion, but simply to drive home that we have high standards when it comes to deciding whether a story is true or not. Those who want to convince us that there is a God, and that a certain religion has access to eternal truth, should be expected—just as Humanists should be—to produce serious, credible, testable evidence in support of their claims.

Is There a God?

Or, Doesn’t It Take Just as Much Faith Not to Believe?

Now, just because science makes good sense—because it can help us fly the plane we want to take us places, or create medicine that can heal us—doesn’t mean that the Big Bang seems logical when we first think about it. It’s pretty reasonable, given that we don’t know what happened before the Big Bang, to wonder, what created it? A lot of reasonable people, therefore, think to themselves that it’s just as good as anything else to think God created the Big Bang, and therefore it’s just as good as anything else to assume that a lot of other things religion teaches about God are true too. This is why so many smart people still think that a conversation about what is true and meaningful and worthwhile in life begins with the question Do you believe in God?

But Do you believe in God? is a totally meaningless question. The real question all people—whether secular or religious—ought to be asking themselves and one another is "What do you believe about God?"

Why the seemingly small distinction? Because in this day and age, the word God can mean anything; and so it means nothing.

Recently I had a conversation with a student I’ll call Jennifer, who was interested in the Humanist community at Harvard but was clearly struggling with the idea of coming out and saying she didn’t believe in God. I felt for her: she had a strained, painful relationship with her conservative father, to whom she longed to be closer, and she was afraid that if she said she didn’t believe, he’d finally disown her. Still, she’s a woman of honesty and integrity—which is why she came out as gay, straining their relationship in the first place. She just couldn’t imagine lying about her religious beliefs simply because that was what he wanted to hear. But it was obvious she wanted to be able to say she believed in God, thinking that might smooth things over a little with her family, not to mention give her a sense of security and stability. She didn’t want to have to rebel against everything. So Jennifer was more than a little bit intrigued, and maybe relieved, when Tim Keller, an Evangelical minister in New York City who specializes in working with educated young people, came to Harvard to read from his new book, The Reason for God. Keller’s book is meant to demonstrate that there are good philosophical and intellectual reasons for smart people to believe in God. Keller doesn’t actually succeed in demonstrating that God exists, but he doesn’t need to: all he really has to do is make God seem intellectually respectable for thoughtful people who want to be able to believe.

So Jennifer asked me the question, prominently highlighted in Keller’s book, that inevitably follows Do you believe? for people like her who want their own answer to be yes: "Doesn’t it take just as